Public Safety Works on Information Sharing, May Go for SaaS
November 24, 2008 Dan Burger
|
Data integration problems plague a lot of organizations, but this curse may be best illustrated by examining the grief it brings to law enforcement agencies. It’s here that information sharing can come down to life and death situations without that claim setting off the hyperbole alarms. Improving data integration internally as well as among federal, state, county, and local agencies is a law enforcement priority and there are numerous initiatives and best practices paving the way. The IBM AS/400, iSeries, and System i are sometimes in the line of fire. Using law enforcement as an example of the challenges of information sharing, there are more than 20 federal agencies and more than 20,000 state, county, and local law enforcement departments in the United States. The need for information sharing is big. The payoff comes in areas like increases in the numbers of criminals being identified, apprehended, and convicted; increases in police officer safety; and decreases in administration and operating costs. You may have your own experiences that prove wanting to share information is a long way from actually sharing information. To establish a standards-based electronic information exchange that operates in a secure and trusted environment takes a monumental effort. Project management is a serious task, especially when factoring in the territorial disputes and specific technological biases that are involved in this milieu of organizations spanning law enforcement, judicial, correctional, and related organizations. In the public safety sector, the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative is straining to gain some momentum, but the wheels on a project of this magnitude turn slowly. Its goals will be reached in bits and pieces, not with one flip of a switch. Details of the project can be found at www.it.ojp.gov/global. Those of you in the private sector can easily draw your own parallel circumstances. Guilford PD and the System i Sergeant Hank Lindgren is the systems administrator for the Guilford, Connecticut, police department, an agency that relies on the System i to run its core applications, which for law enforcement is computer aided dispatch (CAD) and a report management system (RMS). Guilford’s software is supplied by Diversified Computer Systems (DCS), makers of software for law enforcement, fire protection, and correctional facilities. (On the DCS Website is an interesting IBM podcast that features the roles of the System i and DCS software in the crime-fighting activities of the West Haven, Connecticut, police department and a case study featuring that same hardware and software combination, which is being used by the Madison County, Mississippi sheriff’s department.) Lindgren, who has seen information sharing efforts come and go, laments opportunities that have been missed, makes note of improvements that have occurred, and remains hopeful that new initiatives will bear fruit. “If every cop could know what every other cop knows, there would be no crime,” Lindgren says. “Because there’s some cop somewhere that knows something about the crime another cop is dealing with right now.” Data sharing is very uneven in what it delivers. In some areas it’s short on providing details and requires officers to do follow-up phone calls to retrieve needed information that can be as basic as names, addresses, dates of birth, and incidents that have brought suspects into contact with other law enforcement agencies. Sometimes that’s enough to raise a red flag, and other times there’s not enough information to make the next informed decision. There are many instances when jurisdictional boundaries throw up road blocks to information sharing. Information compiled by the state is kept on mainframes. Guilford patrolmen use browser-based 3270 emulation to gather, for instance, license and registration information. Browser-based 5250 emulation delivers information from the department’s System i. The footprint of the System i in the public safety segment is not big. That’s not a mystery to people like Lindgren, who have been around the block a time or two. He’s a guy who couldn’t be happier with the platform or the software that he runs on it. As proof, the process of buying a new Power6 box for his department is under way. “Up front cost has hurt AS/400 adoption,” Lindgren says when asked why more agencies don’t run their public sector software on the i platform. At the same time, Lindgren sees tremendous total cost of ownership benefits in the platform. “We are looking at a $20,000 Power Systems server. A Windows box might cost $8,000 or $9,000, but I’ll need two of those. And I’ve found Windows software priced between $250,000 and $725,000, compared to $180,000 for the AS/400. And if I switched to Windows there would be data conversion costs. It used to be hardware was expensive and the software was cheap. Now, it’s the other way around. The price of the AS/400 has come way down. Our first one was like $60,000. Now, we get 10 times the box for a third of the cost.” Software as a Service Gets a Look Building a better mouse trap used to be the sure fire way to bring people to your door. A better idea these days is to make sure your mouse trap can produce cost savings. Skillful marketing can dress almost any product in the robes of reduced operating costs. It’s an easy masquerade. However, the best bet for many organizations on the quest for cutting expenses might not be a product. It might be a service. Software as a service (SaaS) is getting a second and third look by more organizations this time around, and that includes government agencies in the public safety sector. Back around the turn of the century, SaaS was widely known as ASP and organizations that promoted the idea were known as application service providers. Then and now, the biggest obstacle blocking the widespread use of SaaS is the issue of controlling data–keeping it under lock and key and on site. Law enforcement agencies are likely to have bigger issues with this than anyone in the private sector, but there are some things being done in public safety that indicate the business world may warm up to the idea as well. Sungard, a $5 billion company with a strong public sector component, has hundreds of law enforcement agencies running its NaviLine product suite on System i, iSeries, and AS/400 servers and its customer base in the public administration (city and country government) segment is even larger. Peggy Serena, public sector director of client services at SunGard, knows that organizations often resist SaaS because of data control issues, but she believes that controlling costs have become a compelling reason for considering new ways of looking at IT. “If a customer is going to run SunGard software at its site, they have labor costs for running, managing, and updating the box; the labor (costs) to help the users; they pay for a new box every three to five years; they pay for the hardware and the software and maintenance on both. These are no longer a problem if we are hosting and providing hardware and software. It allows the organization’s IT people to work on business processes, helping users create a better end product.” Serena’s job is selling the benefits of a SaaS program that includes SunGard Public Sector Local Government application set. It also adds disaster recovery and high availability options that are offered as part of a complete package or as stand-alone choices. To deliver database replication in real time, SunGard partnered with Maximum Availability, makers of *noMAX software. SunGard sells *noMAX directly, implementing it as a key ingredient in its services offerings. *noMAX provides various levels of disaster recovery, which can be tailored to SunGard’s customer specifications. It includes basic data replication as well as object and IFS replication, and is capable of both one-way and two-way replication, among other capabilities. Maximum Availability CEO Allan Campbell believes software as a service (or ASP as he and others prefer to call it) is going to become increasingly popular and is tailoring his company to take advantage of opportunities with independent data center operators. He regards the partnership with SunGard as a model of what’s to come in IT. “I think the ASP business model is fundamentally sound. The reason it didn’t take off earlier was because it was standing too close to the dot-com bomb when it blew up.” Serena says 2008 has been a very good year for SunGard Public Sector Local Government because its SaaS model (SunGard officially refers to it as an ASP delivery method, too) is able to offer more than organizations can do on their own at the same price point. In the public safety segment, she says customers are running their report management systems on servers in SunGard’s data center that’s set up precisely for this type of business and for these types of reasons. SMB May Lead the Way It’s a pretty safe bet that in 2009 and beyond there will be more executives emphasizing the “do more with less” philosophy. Small businesses could well be leading the way as they opt for regular monthly fees without fluctuations and focus on core competencies instead of IT maintenance costs. Particularly in the small to mid-sized business segment of both the public and private sectors, there are organizations that struggle to keep current with technology. They might find their hardware and software support being withdrawn. Subscriber-based software may be the answer, and it may be cheaper and it may offer a more complete set of application functionality than an organization previously had at its disposal. Those are not guarantees, but they are not pie in the sky either. There will also be cases in which software as a service provides the bridge for organizations that want to move away from a particular platform and this provides the intermediary step in that process. IBM would do well, then, to cultivate the i platform as a SaaS or ASP box, and thereby give its application software partners a chance to push the functionality of their software and not get into arguments over what platform is better or not.
|
